Using your social media monitoring program … to plan your campaigns

Your social media monitoring tools can do more than keep tabs on conversations evolving around your brand or quantify the results of a social media campaign – they can also be useful in the planning phases. When developing a social media campaign, it’s crucial to gauge the current temperature within a target audience before launching a new initiative, and to identify the primary influencers within the segment. Understanding the trends in conversation, what specific demographics of people are talking about your subject and who is sparking the conversation online is key to honing in on exactly what kind of messaging will reach them.

For instance, if you’re launching a campaign for a new all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean, a good place to start would be to track conversation trends over the prior month, to find out what people are saying about your subject.

Identifying the most active demographic groups for a particular subject is also useful, and can help determine the content of your message or the network(s) you target.

Once you’ve identified target demographics, the next step is to identify the people or sites you want to engage with. In PR Newswire’s Social Media Metrics service you can segment this list by any news or social media segment. For instance, you could see who the most influential people on Twitter are for any topic, brand, competitor, etc., which can be ranked either by number of followers:

Audience research also comes in handy when setting goals for a campaign, because it gives you a measurable benchmark from which you can work. Once you’re able to see the current level of influence you and your followers have online, the easier it is to quantitatively measure the success of your campaign, allowing you to see where your strengths are and where you may need to apply additional focus.